Alternating Mourning

      Water, Water Everywhere

      ‘I see’ ‘with my voice.’ – Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette

      Water, water, everywhere, my dead ones, and you wading through ferns to my window, a cat on a buoy, a rabbit on a paddle, a dog with a bowl in her mouth, water rising, water advancing and yes, yes, that is me, swimming through milk of sky, not a speck of barnacle underfoot.

      Water, water, everywhere, bodies, gliding, feathered, furred, sweet pink and brown, your skins, you come to me with your blue eyes and your brown eyes, with your violet and green eyes, you come into my arms that hush and stride, Mother, Father, your legs that kick and strut, my pets, I carry you into my sleep, you come and I have saved my tuna water, I have made a meal of egg and rice for you, I have saved my best thoughts, too, I lay them at the foot of the bed and wait for you to slip under the door.

      Water, my dead ones, and you with your ravaged look. It sometimes takes hours for you to face me, other times you have brought your own utensils, you come and I am open, you swim through my ribs.

      My love, to love is to lose your love, to lose; the hand is emptied, if I turn away, if the rain stops, if I am silent … all the formulas for turning back time.

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      Grief is a century of death, and a century of death before that, and before that, I want to bring you into the fold, Death, I want to drag you right into the mall, the earth, which is made of death.

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      I think about Thích Nhát Hanh smiling every time someone puts her foot on the brake. I see the smiling Buddha in the brake lights too, but more importantly I wonder how he drives in those long robes and then I think of course he doesn’t drive, and it’s easier to find the brake lights amusing.

      I found the brake lights of the car I rear-ended last month alarming. I was calling out to you, my dead ones, I was calling you home, and I smashed into something solid and I forgot about breath.

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      I want to love my memory of you, it’s not a conceptual feeling though I can attempt a grid of my feelings for you, I can calculate the number of verbs, and adverbs; I can leave a how-to diagram on the coffee table if you would like to look at it when I finally sleep.

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      I am feeling about you the way waves feel about the shore. You come at me in endless loops, your moods, the looks on your faces, my lost ones, more alive by the minute, and the colour in your faces tinting with the seasons.

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      I am not interested in what Bourdieu, or Kristeva, has to say about grief. I don’t want a grid, I want arms. I don’t want a theory; I want the poem inside me. I want the poem to unfurl like a thousand monks chanting inside me. I want the poem to skewer me, to catapult me into the clouds. I want to sink into the rhythm of your weeping, I want to say, My grief is turning and I have no way to remain still.

      I am not interested in feeling by proxy; I go to the hollow when I want to empty, I go to theory when I want to sit with someone else’s thinking, I go to myself when I want to see you.

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      I am feeling about clover, I inhale and it honeys my lungs: if I ­finally do catch you and put my mouth to yours you will taste that summer.

      When I am being torn apart, I don’t need you to point out the empty seed pods of winter.

      You won’t find a couplet in the wild, my love; a sestina is a formal garden, a villanelle is the court, a sonnet is an urban love story, an epic is the senate, a prose poem is the city.

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      I am not interested in other words for honey. I am interested in honey.

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      I saw Mary Oliver on Cypress. The rough angles of the coastal mountains terrified her. Later she appeared on Spanish Banks looking west. Distance is helpful, she said, but size isn’t: this is too raw for poetry. I dropped her in Stanley Park, I thought she might be more comfortable wandering the groomed paths.

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      I am operating on instinct here, the way the guy at the beach chooses his rocks to stack and the rocks never topple, they are grey on grey against grey, modular bodies, sturdy, flat, fat as ­islands.

      I can’t be worried about offending Mary. I can’t weigh my grief against a pound of flesh. I have a right to order the driftwood or not. Whole nations have been built on description.

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